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PERLOS2(1)	       Perl Programmers Reference Guide 	    PERLOS2(1)



NAME
       perlos2 - Perl under OS/2, DOS, Win0.3*, Win0.95 and WinNT.

SYNOPSIS
       One can read this document in the following formats:

	       man perlos2
	       view perl perlos2
	       explorer perlos2.html
	       info perlos2

       to list some (not all may be available simultaneously), or it may be
       read as is: either as README.os2, or pod/perlos2.pod.

       To read the .INF version of documentation (very recommended) outside of
       OS/2, one needs an IBMs reader (may be available on IBM ftp sites (?)
       (URL anyone?)) or shipped with PC DOS 7.0 and IBMs Visual Age C++ 3.5.

       A copy of a Win* viewer is contained in the "Just add OS/2 Warp" pack
       age

	 ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/ps/products/os2/tools/jaow/jaow.zip

       in ?:\JUST_ADD\view.exe. This gives one an access to EMXs .INF docs as
       well (text form is available in /emx/doc in EMXs distribution).	There
       is also a different viewer named xview.

       Note that if you have lynx.exe or netscape.exe installed, you can fol
       low WWW links from this document in .INF format. If you have EMX docs
       installed correctly, you can follow library links (you need to have
       "view emxbook" working by setting "EMXBOOK" environment variable as it
       is described in EMX docs).

DESCRIPTION
       Target

       The target is to make OS/2 one of the best supported platform for
       using/building/developing Perl and Perl applications, as well as make
       Perl the best language to use under OS/2. The secondary target is to
       try to make this work under DOS and Win* as well (but not too hard).

       The current state is quite close to this target. Known limitations:

	   Some *nix programs use fork() a lot; with the mostly useful fla
	    vors of perl for OS/2 (there are several built simultaneously)
	    this is supported; but some flavors do not support this (e.g.,
	    when Perl is called from inside REXX).  Using fork() after useing
	    dynamically loading extensions would not work with very old ver
	    sions of EMX.

	   You need a separate perl executable perl__.exe (see perl__.exe) if
	    you want to use PM code in your application (as Perl/Tk or OpenGL
	    Perl modules do) without having a text-mode window present.

	    While using the standard perl.exe from a text-mode window is pos
	    sible too, I have seen cases when this causes degradation of the
	    system stability.  Using perl__.exe avoids such a degradation.

	   There is no simple way to access WPS objects. The only way I know
	    is via "OS2::REXX" and "SOM" extensions (see OS2::REXX, Som).
	    However, we do not have access to convenience methods of
	    Object-REXX. (Is it possible at all? I know of no Object-REXX
	    API.)  The "SOM" extension (currently in alpha-text) may eventu
	    ally remove this shortcoming; however, due to the fact that DII is
	    not supported by the "SOM" module, using "SOM" is not as conve
	    nient as one would like it.

       Please keep this list up-to-date by informing me about other items.

       Other OSes

       Since OS/2 port of perl uses a remarkable EMX environment, it can run
       (and build extensions, and - possibly - be built itself) under any
       environment which can run EMX. The current list is DOS,
       DOS-inside-OS/2, Win0.3*, Win0.95 and WinNT. Out of many perl flavors,
       only one works, see "perl_.exe".

       Note that not all features of Perl are available under these environ
       ments. This depends on the features the extender - most probably RSX -
       decided to implement.

       Cf. Prerequisites.

       Prerequisites


       EMX   EMX runtime is required (may be substituted by RSX). Note that it
	     is possible to make perl_.exe to run under DOS without any exter
	     nal support by binding emx.exe/rsx.exe to it, see emxbind. Note
	     that under DOS for best results one should use RSX runtime, which
	     has much more functions working (like "fork", "popen" and so on).
	     In fact RSX is required if there is no VCPI present. Note the RSX
	     requires DPMI.  Many implementations of DPMI are known to be very
	     buggy, beware!

	     Only the latest runtime is supported, currently "0.9d fix 03".
	     Perl may run under earlier versions of EMX, but this is not
	     tested.

	     One can get different parts of EMX from, say

	       http://www.leo.org/pub/comp/os/os2/leo/gnu/emx+gcc/
	       http://powerusersbbs.com/pub/os2/dev/   [EMX+GCC Development]
	       http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/pub/os2/dev/emx/v0.9d/

	     The runtime component should have the name emxrt.zip.

	     NOTE. When using emx.exe/rsx.exe, it is enough to have them on
	     your path. One does not need to specify them explicitly (though
	     this

	       emx perl_.exe -de 0

	     will work as well.)

       RSX   To run Perl on DPMI platforms one needs RSX runtime. This is
	     needed under DOS-inside-OS/2, Win0.3*, Win0.95 and WinNT (see
	     "Other OSes"). RSX would not work with VCPI only, as EMX would,
	     it requires DMPI.

	     Having RSX and the latest sh.exe one gets a fully functional
	     *nix-ish environment under DOS, say, "fork",  and pipe-"open"
	     work. In fact, MakeMaker works (for static build), so one can
	     have Perl development environment under DOS.

	     One can get RSX from, say

	       ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/os2/emx09c/contrib
	       ftp://ftp.uni-bielefeld.de/pub/systems/msdos/misc
	       ftp://ftp.leo.org/pub/comp/os/os2/leo/devtools/emx+gcc/contrib

	     Contact the author on "rainer@mathematik.uni-bielefeld.de".

	     The latest sh.exe with DOS hooks is available in

	       http://www.ilyaz.org/software/os2/

	     as sh_dos.zip or under similar names starting with "sh", "pdksh"
	     etc.

       HPFS  Perl does not care about file systems, but the perl library con
	     tains many files with long names, so to install it intact one
	     needs a file system which supports long file names.

	     Note that if you do not plan to build the perl itself, it may be
	     possible to fool EMX to truncate file names. This is not sup
	     ported, read EMX docs to see how to do it.

       pdksh To start external programs with complicated command lines (like
	     with pipes in between, and/or quoting of arguments), Perl uses an
	     external shell. With EMX port such shell should be named sh.exe,
	     and located either in the wired-in-during-compile locations (usu
	     ally F:/bin), or in configurable location (see "PERL_SH_DIR").

	     For best results use EMX pdksh. The standard binary (5.2.14 or
	     later) runs under DOS (with RSX) as well, see

	       http://www.ilyaz.org/software/os2/

       Starting Perl programs under OS/2 (and DOS and...)

       Start your Perl program foo.pl with arguments "arg1 arg2 arg3" the same
       way as on any other platform, by

	       perl foo.pl arg1 arg2 arg3

       If you want to specify perl options "-my_opts" to the perl itself (as
       opposed to your program), use

	       perl -my_opts foo.pl arg1 arg2 arg3

       Alternately, if you use OS/2-ish shell, like CMD or 4os2, put the fol
       lowing at the start of your perl script:

	       extproc perl -S -my_opts

       rename your program to foo.cmd, and start it by typing

	       foo arg1 arg2 arg3

       Note that because of stupid OS/2 limitations the full path of the perl
       script is not available when you use "extproc", thus you are forced to
       use "-S" perl switch, and your script should be on the "PATH". As a
       plus side, if you know a full path to your script, you may still start
       it with

	       perl ../../blah/foo.cmd arg1 arg2 arg3

       (note that the argument "-my_opts" is taken care of by the "extproc"
       line in your script, see ""extproc" on the first line").

       To understand what the above magic does, read perl docs about "-S"
       switch - see perlrun, and cmdref about "extproc":

	       view perl perlrun
	       man perlrun
	       view cmdref extproc
	       help extproc

       or whatever method you prefer.

       There are also endless possibilities to use executable extensions of
       4os2, associations of WPS and so on... However, if you use *nixish
       shell (like sh.exe supplied in the binary distribution), you need to
       follow the syntax specified in "Switches" in perlrun.

       Note that -S switch supports scripts with additional extensions .cmd,
       .btm, .bat, .pl as well.

       Starting OS/2 (and DOS) programs under Perl

       This is what system() (see "system" in perlfunc),  (see "I/O Opera
       tors" in perlop), and open pipe (see "open" in perlfunc) are for.
       (Avoid exec() (see "exec" in perlfunc) unless you know what you do).

       Note however that to use some of these operators you need to have a sh-
       syntax shell installed (see "Pdksh", "Frequently asked questions"), and
       perl should be able to find it (see "PERL_SH_DIR").

       The cases when the shell is used are:

       1   One-argument system() (see "system" in perlfunc), exec() (see
	   "exec" in perlfunc) with redirection or shell meta-characters;

       2   Pipe-open (see "open" in perlfunc) with the command which contains
	   redirection or shell meta-characters;

       3   Backticks  (see "I/O Operators" in perlop) with the command which
	   contains redirection or shell meta-characters;

       4   If the executable called by system()/exec()/pipe-open()/ is a
	   script with the "magic" "#!" line or "extproc" line which specifies
	   shell;

       5   If the executable called by system()/exec()/pipe-open()/ is a
	   script without "magic" line, and $ENV{EXECSHELL} is set to shell;

       6   If the executable called by system()/exec()/pipe-open()/ is not
	   found (is not this remark obsolete?);

       7   For globbing (see "glob" in perlfunc, "I/O Operators" in perlop)
	   (obsolete? Perl uses builtin globbing nowadays...).

       For the sake of speed for a common case, in the above algorithms back
       slashes in the command name are not considered as shell metacharacters.

       Perl starts scripts which begin with cookies "extproc" or "#!"
       directly, without an intervention of shell.  Perl uses the same algo
       rithm to find the executable as pdksh: if the path on "#!" line does
       not work, and contains "/", then the directory part of the executable
       is ignored, and the executable is searched in . and on "PATH".  To find
       arguments for these scripts Perl uses a different algorithm than pdksh:
       up to 3 arguments are recognized, and trailing whitespace is stripped.

       If a script does not contain such a cooky, then to avoid calling
       sh.exe, Perl uses the same algorithm as pdksh: if $ENV{EXECSHELL} is
       set, the script is given as the first argument to this command, if not
       set, then "$ENV{COMSPEC} /c" is used (or a hardwired guess if $ENV{COM
       SPEC} is not set).

       When starting scripts directly, Perl uses exactly the same algorithm as
       for the search of script given by -S command-line option: it will look
       in the current directory, then on components of $ENV{PATH} using the
       following order of appended extensions: no extension, .cmd, .btm, .bat,
       .pl.

       Note that Perl will start to look for scripts only if OS/2 cannot start
       the specified application, thus "system blah" will not look for a
       script if there is an executable file blah.exe anywhere on "PATH".  In
       other words, "PATH" is essentially searched twice: once by the OS for
       an executable, then by Perl for scripts.

       Note also that executable files on OS/2 can have an arbitrary exten
       sion, but .exe will be automatically appended if no dot is present in
       the name.  The workaround is as simple as that:	since blah. and blah
       denote the same file (at list on FAT and HPFS file systems), to start
       an executable residing in file n:/bin/blah (no extension) give an argu
       ment "n:/bin/blah." (dot appended) to system().

       Perl will start PM programs from VIO (=text-mode) Perl process in a
       separate PM session; the opposite is not true: when you start a non-PM
       program from a PM Perl process, Perl would not run it in a separate
       session.  If a separate session is desired, either ensure that shell
       will be used, as in "system cmd /c myprog", or start it using
       optional arguments to system() documented in "OS2::Process" module.
       This is considered to be a feature.

Frequently asked questions
       "It does not work"

       Perl binary distributions come with a testperl.cmd script which tries
       to detect common problems with misconfigured installations.  There is a
       pretty large chance it will discover which step of the installation you
       managed to goof.  ";-)"

       I cannot run external programs


	  Did you run your programs with "-w" switch? See "2 (and DOS) pro
	   grams under Perl" in Starting OS.

	  Do you try to run internal shell commands, like copy a b (inter
	   nal for cmd.exe), or glob a*b (internal for ksh)? You need to
	   specify your shell explicitly, like cmd /c copy a b, since Perl
	   cannot deduce which commands are internal to your shell.

       I cannot embed perl into my program, or use perl.dll from my program.


       Is your program EMX-compiled with "-Zmt -Zcrtdll"?
	   Well, nowadays Perl DLL should be usable from a differently com
	   piled program too...  If you can run Perl code from REXX scripts
	   (see OS2::REXX), then there are some other aspect of interaction
	   which are overlooked by the current hackish code to support differ
	   ently-compiled principal programs.

	   If everything else fails, you need to build a stand-alone DLL for
	   perl. Contact me, I did it once. Sockets would not work, as a lot
	   of other stuff.

       Did you use ExtUtils::Embed?
	   Some time ago I had reports it does not work.  Nowadays it is
	   checked in the Perl test suite, so grep ./t subdirectory of the
	   build tree (as well as *.t files in the ./lib subdirectory) to find
	   how it should be done "correctly".

	and pipe-"open" do not work under DOS.

       This may a variant of just "I cannot run external programs", or a
       deeper problem. Basically: you need RSX (see "Prerequisites") for these
       commands to work, and you may need a port of sh.exe which understands
       command arguments. One of such ports is listed in "Prerequisites" under
       RSX. Do not forget to set variable ""PERL_SH_DIR"" as well.

       DPMI is required for RSX.

       Cannot start "find.exe "pattern" file"

       The whole idea of the "standard C API to start applications" is that
       the forms "foo" and "foo" of program arguments are completely inter
       changable.  find breaks this paradigm;

	 find "pattern" file
	 find pattern file

       are not equivalent; find cannot be started directly using the above
       API.  One needs a way to surround the doublequotes in some other quot
       ing construction, necessarily having an extra non-Unixish shell in
       between.

       Use one of

	 system cmd, /c, find "pattern" file;
	 cmd /c find "pattern" file

       This would start find.exe via cmd.exe via "sh.exe" via "perl.exe", but
       this is a price to pay if you want to use non-conforming program.

INSTALLATION
       Automatic binary installation

       The most convenient way of installing a binary distribution of perl is
       via perl installer install.exe. Just follow the instructions, and 99%
       of the installation blues would go away.

       Note however, that you need to have unzip.exe on your path, and EMX
       environment running. The latter means that if you just installed EMX,
       and made all the needed changes to Config.sys, you may need to reboot
       in between. Check EMX runtime by running

	       emxrev

       Binary installer also creates a folder on your desktop with some useful
       objects.  If you need to change some aspects of the work of the binary
       installer, feel free to edit the file Perl.pkg.	This may be useful
       e.g., if you need to run the installer many times and do not want to
       make many interactive changes in the GUI.

       Things not taken care of by automatic binary installation:

       "PERL_BADLANG" may be needed if you change your codepage after perl
		      installation, and the new value is not supported by EMX.
		      See "PERL_BADLANG".

       "PERL_BADFREE" see "PERL_BADFREE".

       Config.pm      This file resides somewhere deep in the location you
		      installed your perl library, find it out by

			perl -MConfig -le "print $INC{Config.pm}"

		      While most important values in this file are updated by
		      the binary installer, some of them may need to be
		      hand-edited. I know no such data, please keep me
		      informed if you find one.  Moreover, manual changes to
		      the installed version may need to be accompanied by an
		      edit of this file.

       NOTE. Because of a typo the binary installer of 5.00305 would install a
       variable "PERL_SHPATH" into Config.sys. Please remove this variable and
       put "PERL_SH_DIR" instead.

       Manual binary installation

       As of version 5.00305, OS/2 perl binary distribution comes split into
       11 components. Unfortunately, to enable configurable binary installa
       tion, the file paths in the zip files are not absolute, but relative to
       some directory.

       Note that the extraction with the stored paths is still necessary
       (default with unzip, specify "-d" to pkunzip). However, you need to
       know where to extract the files. You need also to manually change
       entries in Config.sys to reflect where did you put the files. Note that
       if you have some primitive unzipper (like "pkunzip"), you may get a lot
       of warnings/errors during unzipping. Upgrade to "(w)unzip".

       Below is the sample of what to do to reproduce the configuration on my
       machine.  In VIEW.EXE you can press "Ctrl-Insert" now, and cut-and-
       paste from the resulting file - created in the directory you started
       VIEW.EXE from.

       For each component, we mention environment variables related to each
       installation directory.	Either choose directories to match your values
       of the variables, or create/append-to variables to take into account
       the directories.

       Perl VIO and PM executables (dynamically linked)
	    unzip perl_exc.zip *.exe *.ico -d f:/emx.add/bin
	    unzip perl_exc.zip *.dll -d f:/emx.add/dll

	  (have the directories with "*.exe" on PATH, and "*.dll" on LIBPATH);

       Perl_ VIO executable (statically linked)
	    unzip perl_aou.zip -d f:/emx.add/bin

	  (have the directory on PATH);

       Executables for Perl utilities
	    unzip perl_utl.zip -d f:/emx.add/bin

	  (have the directory on PATH);

       Main Perl library
	    unzip perl_mlb.zip -d f:/perllib/lib

	  If this directory is exactly the same as the prefix which was com
	  piled into perl.exe, you do not need to change anything. However,
	  for perl to find the library if you use a different path, you need
	  to "set PERLLIB_PREFIX" in Config.sys, see "PERLLIB_PREFIX".

       Additional Perl modules
	    unzip perl_ste.zip -d f:/perllib/lib/site_perl/5.8.8/

	  Same remark as above applies.  Additionally, if this directory is
	  not one of directories on @INC (and @INC is influenced by "PERL
	  LIB_PREFIX"), you need to put this directory and subdirectory ./os2
	  in "PERLLIB" or "PERL5LIB" variable. Do not use "PERL5LIB" unless
	  you have it set already. See "ENVIRONMENT" in perl.

	  [Check whether this extraction directory is still applicable with
	  the new directory structure layout!]

       Tools to compile Perl modules
	    unzip perl_blb.zip -d f:/perllib/lib

	  Same remark as for perl_ste.zip.

       Manpages for Perl and utilities
	    unzip perl_man.zip -d f:/perllib/man

	  This directory should better be on "MANPATH". You need to have a
	  working man to access these files.

       Manpages for Perl modules
	    unzip perl_mam.zip -d f:/perllib/man

	  This directory should better be on "MANPATH". You need to have a
	  working man to access these files.

       Source for Perl documentation
	    unzip perl_pod.zip -d f:/perllib/lib

	  This is used by the "perldoc" program (see perldoc), and may be used
	  to generate HTML documentation usable by WWW browsers, and documen
	  tation in zillions of other formats: "info", "LaTeX", "Acrobat",
	  "FrameMaker" and so on.  [Use programs such as pod2latex etc.]

       Perl manual in .INF format
	    unzip perl_inf.zip -d d:/os2/book

	  This directory should better be on "BOOKSHELF".

       Pdksh
	    unzip perl_sh.zip -d f:/bin

	  This is used by perl to run external commands which explicitly
	  require shell, like the commands using redirection and shell
	  metacharacters. It is also used instead of explicit /bin/sh.

	  Set "PERL_SH_DIR" (see "PERL_SH_DIR") if you move sh.exe from the
	  above location.

	  Note. It may be possible to use some other sh-compatible shell
	  (untested).

       After you installed the components you needed and updated the Con
       fig.sys correspondingly, you need to hand-edit Config.pm. This file
       resides somewhere deep in the location you installed your perl library,
       find it out by

	 perl -MConfig -le "print $INC{Config.pm}"

       You need to correct all the entries which look like file paths (they
       currently start with "f:/").

       Warning

       The automatic and manual perl installation leave precompiled paths
       inside perl executables. While these paths are overwriteable (see "PER
       LLIB_PREFIX", "PERL_SH_DIR"), some people may prefer binary editing of
       paths inside the executables/DLLs.

Accessing documentation
       Depending on how you built/installed perl you may have (otherwise iden
       tical) Perl documentation in the following formats:

       OS/2 .INF file

       Most probably the most convenient form. Under OS/2 view it as

	 view perl
	 view perl perlfunc
	 view perl less
	 view perl ExtUtils::MakeMaker

       (currently the last two may hit a wrong location, but this may improve
       soon). Under Win* see "SYNOPSIS".

       If you want to build the docs yourself, and have OS/2 toolkit, run

	       pod2ipf > perl.ipf

       in /perllib/lib/pod directory, then

	       ipfc /inf perl.ipf

       (Expect a lot of errors during the both steps.) Now move it on your
       BOOKSHELF path.

       Plain text

       If you have perl documentation in the source form, perl utilities
       installed, and GNU groff installed, you may use

	       perldoc perlfunc
	       perldoc less
	       perldoc ExtUtils::MakeMaker

       to access the perl documentation in the text form (note that you may
       get better results using perl manpages).

       Alternately, try running pod2text on .pod files.

       Manpages

       If you have man installed on your system, and you installed perl man
       pages, use something like this:

	       man perlfunc
	       man 3 less
	       man ExtUtils.MakeMaker

       to access documentation for different components of Perl. Start with

	       man perl

       Note that dot (.) is used as a package separator for documentation for
       packages, and as usual, sometimes you need to give the section - 3
       above - to avoid shadowing by the less(1) manpage.

       Make sure that the directory above the directory with manpages is on
       our "MANPATH", like this

	 set MANPATH=c:/man;f:/perllib/man

       for Perl manpages in "f:/perllib/man/man1/" etc.

       HTML

       If you have some WWW browser available, installed the Perl documenta
       tion in the source form, and Perl utilities, you can build HTML docs.
       Cd to directory with .pod files, and do like this

	       cd f:/perllib/lib/pod
	       pod2html

       After this you can direct your browser the file perl.html in this
       directory, and go ahead with reading docs, like this:

	       explore file:///f:/perllib/lib/pod/perl.html

       Alternatively you may be able to get these docs prebuilt from CPAN.

       GNU "info" files

       Users of Emacs would appreciate it very much, especially with "CPerl"
       mode loaded. You need to get latest "pod2texi" from "CPAN", or, alter
       nately, the prebuilt info pages.

       PDF files

       for "Acrobat" are available on CPAN (may be for slightly older version
       of perl).

       "LaTeX" docs

       can be constructed using "pod2latex".

BUILD
       Here we discuss how to build Perl under OS/2. There is an alternative
       (but maybe older) view on .

       The short story

       Assume that you are a seasoned porter, so are sure that all the neces
       sary tools are already present on your system, and you know how to get
       the Perl source distribution.  Untar it, change to the extract direc
       tory, and

	 gnupatch -p0 < os2\diff.configure
	 sh Configure -des -D prefix=f:/perllib
	 make
	 make test
	 make install
	 make aout_test
	 make aout_install

       This puts the executables in f:/perllib/bin.  Manually move them to the
       "PATH", manually move the built perl*.dll to "LIBPATH" (here for Perl
       DLL * is a not-very-meaningful hex checksum), and run

	 make installcmd INSTALLCMDDIR=d:/ir/on/path

       Assuming that the "man"-files were put on an appropriate location, this
       completes the installation of minimal Perl system.  (The binary distri
       bution contains also a lot of additional modules, and the documentation
       in INF format.)

       What follows is a detailed guide through these steps.

       Prerequisites

       You need to have the latest EMX development environment, the full GNU
       tool suite (gawk renamed to awk, and GNU find.exe earlier on path than
       the OS/2 find.exe, same with sort.exe, to check use

	 find --version
	 sort --version

       ). You need the latest version of pdksh installed as sh.exe.

       Check that you have BSD libraries and headers installed, and - option
       ally - Berkeley DB headers and libraries, and crypt.

       Possible locations to get the files:

	 ftp://hobbes.nmsu.edu/os2/unix/
	 ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/os2/unix/
	 ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/os2/dev32/
	 ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/os2/emx09c/

       It is reported that the following archives contain enough utils to
       build perl: gnufutil.zip, gnusutil.zip, gnututil.zip, gnused.zip, gnu
       patch.zip, gnuawk.zip, gnumake.zip, gnugrep.zip, bsddev.zip and
       ksh527rt.zip (or a later version).  Note that all these utilities are
       known to be available from LEO:

	 ftp://ftp.leo.org/pub/comp/os/os2/leo/gnu

       Note also that the db.lib and db.a from the EMX distribution are not
       suitable for multi-threaded compile (even single-threaded flavor of
       Perl uses multi-threaded C RTL, for compatibility with XFree86-OS/2).
       Get a corrected one from

	 http://www.ilyaz.org/software/os2/db_mt.zip

       If you have exactly the same version of Perl installed already, make
       sure that no copies or perl are currently running.  Later steps of the
       build may fail since an older version of perl.dll loaded into memory
       may be found.  Running "make test" becomes meaningless, since the test
       are checking a previous build of perl (this situation is detected and
       reported by lib/os2_base.t test).  Do not forget to unset
       "PERL_EMXLOAD_SEC" in environment.

       Also make sure that you have /tmp directory on the current drive, and .
       directory in your "LIBPATH". One may try to correct the latter condi
       tion by

	 set BEGINLIBPATH .\.

       if you use something like CMD.EXE or latest versions of 4os2.exe.
       (Setting BEGINLIBPATH to just "." is ignored by the OS/2 kernel.)

       Make sure your gcc is good for "-Zomf" linking: run "omflibs" script in
       /emx/lib directory.

       Check that you have link386 installed. It comes standard with OS/2, but
       may be not installed due to customization. If typing

	 link386

       shows you do not have it, do Selective install, and choose "Link object
       modules" in Optional system utilities/More. If you get into link386
       prompts, press "Ctrl-C" to exit.

       Getting perl source

       You need to fetch the latest perl source (including developers
       releases). With some probability it is located in

	 http://www.cpan.org/src/5.0
	 http://www.cpan.org/src/5.0/unsupported

       If not, you may need to dig in the indices to find it in the directory
       of the current maintainer.

       Quick cycle of developers release may break the OS/2 build time to
       time, looking into

	 http://www.cpan.org/ports/os2/

       may indicate the latest release which was publicly released by the
       maintainer. Note that the release may include some additional patches
       to apply to the current source of perl.

       Extract it like this

	 tar vzxf perl5.00409.tar.gz

       You may see a message about errors while extracting Configure. This is
       because there is a conflict with a similarly-named file configure.

       Change to the directory of extraction.

       Application of the patches

       You need to apply the patches in ./os2/diff.* like this:

	 gnupatch -p0 < os2\diff.configure

       You may also need to apply the patches supplied with the binary distri
       bution of perl.	It also makes sense to look on the perl5-porters mail
       ing list for the latest OS/2-related patches (see
       ).  Such
       patches usually contain strings "/os2/" and "patch", so it makes sense
       looking for these strings.

       Hand-editing

       You may look into the file ./hints/os2.sh and correct anything wrong
       you find there. I do not expect it is needed anywhere.

       Making

	 sh Configure -des -D prefix=f:/perllib

       "prefix" means: where to install the resulting perl library. Giving
       correct prefix you may avoid the need to specify "PERLLIB_PREFIX", see
       "PERLLIB_PREFIX".

       Ignore the message about missing "ln", and about "-c" option to tr. The
       latter is most probably already fixed, if you see it and can trace
       where the latter spurious warning comes from, please inform me.

       Now

	 make

       At some moment the built may die, reporting a version mismatch or
       unable to run perl.  This means that you do not have . in your LIBPATH,
       so perl.exe cannot find the needed perl67B2.dll (treat these hex digits
       as line noise).	After this is fixed the build should finish without a
       lot of fuss.

       Testing

       Now run

	 make test

       All tests should succeed (with some of them skipped).  If you have the
       same version of Perl installed, it is crucial that you have "." early
       in your LIBPATH (or in BEGINLIBPATH), otherwise your tests will most
       probably test the wrong version of Perl.

       Some tests may generate extra messages similar to

       A lot of "bad free"
	   in database tests related to Berkeley DB. This should be fixed
	   already.  If it persists, you may disable this warnings, see
	   "PERL_BADFREE".

       Process terminated by SIGTERM/SIGINT
	   This is a standard message issued by OS/2 applications. *nix appli
	   cations die in silence. It is considered to be a feature. One can
	   easily disable this by appropriate sighandlers.

	   However the test engine bleeds these message to screen in unex
	   pected moments. Two messages of this kind should be present during
	   testing.

       To get finer test reports, call

	 perl t/harness

       The report with io/pipe.t failing may look like this:

	 Failed Test  Status Wstat Total Fail  Failed  List of failed
	 ------------------------------------------------------------
	 io/pipe.t		      12    1	8.33%  9
	 7 tests skipped, plus 56 subtests skipped.
	 Failed 1/195 test scripts, 99.49% okay. 1/6542 subtests failed, 99.98% okay.

       The reasons for most important skipped tests are:

       op/fs.t
	       18  Checks "atime" and "mtime" of "stat()" - unfortunately,
		   HPFS provides only 2sec time granularity (for compatibility
		   with FAT?).

	       25  Checks "truncate()" on a filehandle just opened for write -
		   I do not know why this should or should not work.

       op/stat.t
	       Checks "stat()". Tests:

	       4   Checks "atime" and "mtime" of "stat()" - unfortunately,
		   HPFS provides only 2sec time granularity (for compatibility
		   with FAT?).

       Installing the built perl

       If you havent yet moved "perl*.dll" onto LIBPATH, do it now.

       Run

	 make install

       It would put the generated files into needed locations. Manually put
       perl.exe, perl__.exe and perl___.exe to a location on your PATH,
       perl.dll to a location on your LIBPATH.

       Run

	 make installcmd INSTALLCMDDIR=d:/ir/on/path

       to convert perl utilities to .cmd files and put them on PATH. You need
       to put .EXE-utilities on path manually. They are installed in "$pre
       fix/bin", here $prefix is what you gave to Configure, see Making.

       If you use "man", either move the installed */man/ directories to your
       "MANPATH", or modify "MANPATH" to match the location.  (One could have
       avoided this by providing a correct "manpath" option to ./Configure, or
       editing ./config.sh between configuring and making steps.)

       "a.out"-style build

       Proceed as above, but make perl_.exe (see "perl_.exe") by

	 make perl_

       test and install by

	 make aout_test
	 make aout_install

       Manually put perl_.exe to a location on your PATH.

       Note. The build process for "perl_" does not know about all the depen
       dencies, so you should make sure that anything is up-to-date, say, by
       doing

	 make perl_dll

       first.

Building a binary distribution
       [This section provides a short overview only...]

       Building should proceed differently depending on whether the version of
       perl you install is already present and used on your system, or is a
       new version not yet used.  The description below assumes that the ver
       sion is new, so installing its DLLs and .pm files will not disrupt the
       operation of your system even if some intermediate steps are not yet
       fully working.

       The other cases require a little bit more convoluted procedures.  Below
       I suppose that the current version of Perl is 5.8.2, so the executables
       are named accordingly.

       1.  Fully build and test the Perl distribution.	Make sure that no
	   tests are failing with "test" and "aout_test" targets; fix the bugs
	   in Perl and the Perl test suite detected by these tests.  Make sure
	   that "all_test" make target runs as clean as possible.  Check that
	   "os2/perlrexx.cmd" runs fine.

       2.  Fully install Perl, including "installcmd" target.  Copy the gener
	   ated DLLs to "LIBPATH"; copy the numbered Perl executables (as in
	   perl5.8.2.exe) to "PATH"; copy "perl_.exe" to "PATH" as
	   "perl_5.8.2.exe".  Think whether you need backward-compatibility
	   DLLs.  In most cases you do not need to install them yet; but some
	   time this may simplify the following steps.

       3.  Make sure that "CPAN.pm" can download files from CPAN.  If not, you
	   may need to manually install "Net::FTP".

       4.  Install the bundle "Bundle::OS2_default"

	     perl5.8.2 -MCPAN -e "install Bundle::OS2_default" < nul |& tee 00cpan_i_1

	   This may take a couple of hours on 1GHz processor (when run the
	   first time).  And this should not be necessarily a smooth proce
	   dure.  Some modules may not specify required dependencies, so one
	   may need to repeat this procedure several times until the results
	   stabilize.

	     perl5.8.2 -MCPAN -e "install Bundle::OS2_default" < nul |& tee 00cpan_i_2
	     perl5.8.2 -MCPAN -e "install Bundle::OS2_default" < nul |& tee 00cpan_i_3

	   Even after they stabilize, some tests may fail.

	   Fix as many discovered bugs as possible.  Document all the bugs
	   which are not fixed, and all the failures with unknown reasons.
	   Inspect the produced logs 00cpan_i_1 to find suspiciously skipped
	   tests, and other fishy events.

	   Keep in mind that installation of some modules may fail too: for
	   example, the DLLs to update may be already loaded by CPAN.pm.
	   Inspect the "install" logs (in the example above 00cpan_i_1 etc)
	   for errors, and install things manually, as in

	     cd $CPANHOME/.cpan/build/Digest-MD5-2.31
	     make install

	   Some distributions may fail some tests, but you may want to install
	   them anyway (as above, or via "force install" command of "CPAN.pm"
	   shell-mode).

	   Since this procedure may take quite a long time to complete, it
	   makes sense to "freeze" your CPAN configuration by disabling peri
	   odic updates of the local copy of CPAN index: set "index_expire" to
	   some big value (I use 365), then save the settings

	     CPAN> o conf index_expire 365
	     CPAN> o conf commit

	   Reset back to the default value 1 when you are finished.

       5.  When satisfied with the results, rerun the "installcmd" target.
	   Now you can copy "perl5.8.2.exe" to "perl.exe", and install the
	   other OMF-build executables: "perl__.exe" etc.  They are ready to
	   be used.

       6.  Change to the "./pod" directory of the build tree, download the
	   Perl logo CamelGrayBig.BMP, and run

	     ( perl2ipf > perl.ipf ) |& tee 00ipf
	     ipfc /INF perl.ipf |& tee 00inf

	   This produces the Perl docs online book "perl.INF".	Install in on
	   "BOOKSHELF" path.

       7.  Now is the time to build statically linked executable perl_.exe
	   which includes newly-installed via "Bundle::OS2_default" modules.
	   Doing testing via "CPAN.pm" is going to be painfully slow, since it
	   statically links a new executable per XS extension.

	   Here is a possible workaround: create a toplevel Makefile.PL in
	   $CPANHOME/.cpan/build/ with contents being (compare with "Making
	   executables with a custom collection of statically loaded exten
	   sions")

	     use ExtUtils::MakeMaker;
	     WriteMakefile NAME => dummy;

	   execute this as

	     perl_5.8.2.exe Makefile.PL :

	     use ExtUtils::MakeMaker;
	     WriteMakefile NAME => dummy;

       2.  Run it with the flavor of Perl (perl.exe or perl_.exe) you want to
	   rebuild.

	     perl_ Makefile.PL

       3.  Ask it to create new Perl executable:

	     make perl

	   (you may need to manually add "PERLTYPE=-DPERL_CORE" to this com
	   mandline on some versions of Perl; the symptom is that the command-
	   line globbing does not work from OS/2 shells with the newly-com
	   piled executable; check with

	     .\perl.exe -wle "print for @ARGV" *

	   ).

       4.  The previous step created perlmain.c which contains a list of
	   newXS() calls near the end.	Removing unnecessary calls, and rerun
	   ning

	     make perl

	   will produce a customized executable.

       Making executables with a custom search-paths

       The default perl executable is flexible enough to support most usages.
       However, one may want something yet more flexible; for example, one may
       want to find Perl DLL relatively to the location of the EXE file; or
       one may want to ignore the environment when setting the Perl-library
       search patch, etc.

       If you fill comfortable with embedding interface (see perlembed), such
       things are easy to do repeating the steps outlined in "Making executa
       bles with a custom collection of statically loaded extensions", and
       doing more comprehensive edits to main() of perlmain.c.	The people
       with little desire to understand Perl can just rename main(), and do
       necessary modification in a custom main() which calls the renamed func
       tion in appropriate time.

       However, there is a third way: perl DLL exports the main() function and
       several callbacks to customize the search path.	Below is a complete
       example of a "Perl loader" which

       1.  Looks for Perl DLL in the directory "$exedir/../dll";

       2.  Prepends the above directory to "BEGINLIBPATH";

       3.  Fails if the Perl DLL found via "BEGINLIBPATH" is different from
	   what was loaded on step 1; e.g., another process could have loaded
	   it from "LIBPATH" or from a different value of "BEGINLIBPATH".  In
	   these cases one needs to modify the setting of the system so that
	   this other process either does not run, or loads the DLL from
	   "BEGINLIBPATH" with "LIBPATHSTRICT=T" (available with kernels after
	   September 2000).

       4.  Loads Perl library from "$exedir/../dll/lib/".

       5.  Uses Bourne shell from "$exedir/../dll/sh/ksh.exe".

       For best results compile the C file below with the same options as the
       Perl DLL.  However, a lot of functionality will work even if the exe
       cutable is not an EMX applications, e.g., if compiled with

	 gcc -Wall -DDOSISH -DOS2=1 -O2 -s -Zomf -Zsys perl-starter.c -DPERL_DLL_BASENAME=\"perl312F\" -Zstack 8192 -Zlinker /PM:VIO

       Here is the sample C file:

	 #define INCL_DOS
	 #define INCL_NOPM
	 /* These are needed for compile if os2.h includes os2tk.h, not os2emx.h */
	 #define INCL_DOSPROCESS
	 #include 

	 #include "EXTERN.h"
	 #define PERL_IN_MINIPERLMAIN_C
	 #include "perl.h"

	 static char *me;
	 HMODULE handle;

	 static void
	 die_with(char *msg1, char *msg2, char *msg3, char *msg4)
	 {
	    ULONG c;
	    char *s = " error: ";

	    DosWrite(2, me, strlen(me), &c);
	    DosWrite(2, s, strlen(s), &c);
	    DosWrite(2, msg1, strlen(msg1), &c);
	    DosWrite(2, msg2, strlen(msg2), &c);
	    DosWrite(2, msg3, strlen(msg3), &c);
	    DosWrite(2, msg4, strlen(msg4), &c);
	    DosWrite(2, "\r\n", 2, &c);
	    exit(255);
	 }

	 typedef ULONG (*fill_extLibpath_t)(int type, char *pre, char *post, int replace, char *msg);
	 typedef int (*main_t)(int type, char *argv[], char *env[]);
	 typedef int (*handler_t)(void* data, int which);

	 #ifndef PERL_DLL_BASENAME
	 #  define PERL_DLL_BASENAME "perl"
	 #endif

	 static HMODULE
	 load_perl_dll(char *basename)
	 {
	     char buf[300], fail[260];
	     STRLEN l, dirl;
	     fill_extLibpath_t f;
	     ULONG rc_fullname;
	     HMODULE handle, handle1;

	     if (_execname(buf, sizeof(buf) - 13) != 0)
		 die_with("Cant find full path: ", strerror(errno), "", "");
	     /* XXXX Fill me with new value */
	     l = strlen(buf);
	     while (l && buf[l-1] != / && buf[l-1] != \\)
		 l--;
	     dirl = l - 1;
	     strcpy(buf + l, basename);
	     l += strlen(basename);
	     strcpy(buf + l, ".dll");
	     if ( (rc_fullname = DosLoadModule(fail, sizeof fail, buf, &handle)) != 0
		  && DosLoadModule(fail, sizeof fail, basename, &handle) != 0 )
		 die_with("Cant load DLL ", buf, "", "");
	     if (rc_fullname)
		 return handle; 	       /* was loaded with short name; all is fine */
	     if (DosQueryProcAddr(handle, 0, "fill_extLibpath", (PFN*)&f))
		 die_with(buf, ": DLL exports no symbol ", "fill_extLibpath", "");
	     buf[dirl] = 0;
	     if (f(0 /*BEGINLIBPATH*/, buf /* prepend */, NULL /* append */,
		   0 /* keep old value */, me))
		 die_with(me, ": prepending BEGINLIBPATH", "", "");
	     if (DosLoadModule(fail, sizeof fail, basename, &handle1) != 0)
		 die_with(me, ": finding perl DLL again via BEGINLIBPATH", "", "");
	     buf[dirl] = \\;
	     if (handle1 != handle) {
		 if (DosQueryModuleName(handle1, sizeof(fail), fail))
		     strcpy(fail, "???");
		 die_with(buf, ":\n\tperl DLL via BEGINLIBPATH is different: \n\t",
			  fail,
			  "\n\tYou may need to manipulate global BEGINLIBPATH and LIBPATHSTRICT"
			  "\n\tso that the other copy is loaded via BEGINLIBPATH.");
	     }
	     return handle;
	 }

	 int
	 main(int argc, char **argv, char **env)
	 {
	     main_t f;
	     handler_t h;

	     me = argv[0];
	     /**/
	     handle = load_perl_dll(PERL_DLL_BASENAME);

	     if (DosQueryProcAddr(handle, 0, "Perl_OS2_handler_install", (PFN*)&h))
		 die_with(PERL_DLL_BASENAME, ": DLL exports no symbol ", "Perl_OS2_handler_install", "");
	     if ( !h((void *)"~installprefix", Perlos2_handler_perllib_from)
		  || !h((void *)"~dll", Perlos2_handler_perllib_to)
		  || !h((void *)"~dll/sh/ksh.exe", Perlos2_handler_perl_sh) )
		 die_with(PERL_DLL_BASENAME, ": Cant install @INC manglers", "", "");

	     if (DosQueryProcAddr(handle, 0, "dll_perlmain", (PFN*)&f))
		 die_with(PERL_DLL_BASENAME, ": DLL exports no symbol ", "dll_perlmain", "");
	     return f(argc, argv, env);
	 }

Build FAQ
       Some "/" became "\" in pdksh.

       You have a very old pdksh. See Prerequisites.


       You do not have MT-safe db.lib. See Prerequisites.

       Problems with tr or sed

       reported with very old version of tr and sed.

       Some problem (forget which ;-)

       You have an older version of perl.dll on your LIBPATH, which broke the
       build of extensions.

       Library ... not found

       You did not run "omflibs". See Prerequisites.

       Segfault in make

       You use an old version of GNU make. See Prerequisites.

       op/sprintf test failure

       This can result from a bug in emx sprintf which was fixed in 0.9d fix
       03.

Specific (mis)features of OS/2 port
       "setpriority", "getpriority"

       Note that these functions are compatible with *nix, not with the older
       ports of 94 - 95. The priorities are absolute, go from 32 to -95,
       lower is quicker. 0 is the default priority.

       WARNING.  Calling "getpriority" on a non-existing process could lock
       the system before Warp3 fixpak22.  Starting with Warp3, Perl will use a
       workaround: it aborts getpriority() if the process is not present.
       This is not possible on older versions "2.*", and has a race condition
       anyway.

       "system()"

       Multi-argument form of "system()" allows an additional numeric
       argument. The meaning of this argument is described in OS2::Process.

       When finding a program to run, Perl first asks the OS to look for exe
       cutables on "PATH" (OS/2 adds extension .exe if no extension is
       present).  If not found, it looks for a script with possible extensions
       added in this order: no extension, .cmd, .btm, .bat, .pl.  If found,
       Perl checks the start of the file for magic strings "#!" and "extproc
       ".  If found, Perl uses the rest of the first line as the beginning of
       the command line to run this script.  The only mangling done to the
       first line is extraction of arguments (currently up to 3), and ignoring
       of the path-part of the "interpreter" name if it cant be found using
       the full path.

       E.g., "system foo, bar, baz" may lead Perl to finding
       C:/emx/bin/foo.cmd with the first line being

	extproc /bin/bash    -x   -c

       If /bin/bash.exe is not found, then Perl looks for an executable
       bash.exe on "PATH".  If found in C:/emx.add/bin/bash.exe, then the
       above system() is translated to

	 system qw(C:/emx.add/bin/bash.exe -x -c C:/emx/bin/foo.cmd bar baz)

       One additional translation is performed: instead of /bin/sh Perl uses
       the hardwired-or-customized shell (see ""PERL_SH_DIR"").

       The above search for "interpreter" is recursive: if bash executable is
       not found, but bash.btm is found, Perl will investigate its first line
       etc.  The only hardwired limit on the recursion depth is implicit:
       there is a limit 4 on the number of additional arguments inserted
       before the actual arguments given to system().  In particular, if no
       additional arguments are specified on the "magic" first lines, then the
       limit on the depth is 4.

       If Perl finds that the found executable is of PM type when the current
       session is not, it will start the new process in a separate session of
       necessary type.	Call via "OS2::Process" to disable this magic.

       WARNING.  Due to the described logic, you need to explicitly specify
       .com extension if needed.  Moreover, if the executable perl5.6.1 is
       requested, Perl will not look for perl5.6.1.exe.  [This may change in
       the future.]

       "extproc" on the first line

       If the first chars of a Perl script are "extproc ", this line is
       treated as "#!"-line, thus all the switches on this line are processed
       (twice if script was started via cmd.exe).  See "DESCRIPTION" in perl
       run.

       Additional modules:

       OS2::Process, OS2::DLL, OS2::REXX, OS2::PrfDB, OS2::ExtAttr. These mod
       ules provide access to additional numeric argument for "system" and to
       the information about the running process, to DLLs having functions
       with REXX signature and to the REXX runtime, to OS/2 databases in the
       .INI format, and to Extended Attributes.

       Two additional extensions by Andreas Kaiser, "OS2::UPM", and
       "OS2::FTP", are included into "ILYAZ" directory, mirrored on CPAN.
       Other OS/2-related extensions are available too.

       Prebuilt methods:


       "File::Copy::syscopy"
	   used by "File::Copy::copy", see File::Copy.

       "DynaLoader::mod2fname"
	   used by "DynaLoader" for DLL name mangling.

       "Cwd::current_drive()"
	   Self explanatory.

       "Cwd::sys_chdir(name)"
	   leaves drive as it is.

       "Cwd::change_drive(name)"
	   chanes the "current" drive.

       "Cwd::sys_is_absolute(name)"
	   means has drive letter and is_rooted.

       "Cwd::sys_is_rooted(name)"
	   means has leading "[/\\]" (maybe after a drive-letter:).

       "Cwd::sys_is_relative(name)"
	   means changes with current dir.

       "Cwd::sys_cwd(name)"
	   Interface to cwd from EMX. Used by "Cwd::cwd".

       "Cwd::sys_abspath(name, dir)"
	   Really really odious function to implement. Returns absolute name
	   of file which would have "name" if CWD were "dir".  "Dir" defaults
	   to the current dir.

       "Cwd::extLibpath([type])"
	   Get current value of extended library search path. If "type" is
	   present and positive, works with "END_LIBPATH", if negative, works
	   with "LIBPATHSTRICT", otherwise with "BEGIN_LIBPATH".

       "Cwd::extLibpath_set( path [, type ] )"
	   Set current value of extended library search path. If "type" is
	   present and positive, works with , if negative, works
	   with "LIBPATHSTRICT", otherwise with "BEGIN_LIBPATH".

       "OS2::Error(do_harderror,do_exception)"
	   Returns   "undef" if it was not called yet, otherwise bit 1 is set
	   if on the previous call do_harderror was enabled, bit 2 is set if
	   on previous call do_exception was enabled.

	   This function enables/disables error popups associated with hard
	   ware errors (Disk not ready etc.) and software exceptions.

	   I know of no way to find out the state of popups before the first
	   call to this function.

       "OS2::Errors2Drive(drive)"
	   Returns "undef" if it was not called yet, otherwise return false if
	   errors were not requested to be written to a hard drive, or the
	   drive letter if this was requested.

	   This function may redirect error popups associated with hardware
	   errors (Disk not ready etc.) and software exceptions to the file
	   POPUPLOG.OS2 at the root directory of the specified drive.  Over
	   rides OS2::Error() specified by individual programs.  Given argu
	   ment undef will disable redirection.

	   Has global effect, persists after the application exits.

	   I know of no way to find out the state of redirection of popups to
	   the disk before the first call to this function.

       OS2::SysInfo()
	   Returns a hash with system information. The keys of the hash are

		   MAX_PATH_LENGTH, MAX_TEXT_SESSIONS, MAX_PM_SESSIONS,
		   MAX_VDM_SESSIONS, BOOT_DRIVE, DYN_PRI_VARIATION,
		   MAX_WAIT, MIN_SLICE, MAX_SLICE, PAGE_SIZE,
		   VERSION_MAJOR, VERSION_MINOR, VERSION_REVISION,
		   MS_COUNT, TIME_LOW, TIME_HIGH, TOTPHYSMEM, TOTRESMEM,
		   TOTAVAILMEM, MAXPRMEM, MAXSHMEM, TIMER_INTERVAL,
		   MAX_COMP_LENGTH, FOREGROUND_FS_SESSION,
		   FOREGROUND_PROCESS

       OS2::BootDrive()
	   Returns a letter without colon.

       "OS2::MorphPM(serve)", "OS2::UnMorphPM(serve)"
	   Transforms the current application into a PM application and back.
	   The argument true means that a real message loop is going to be
	   served.  OS2::MorphPM() returns the PM message queue handle as an
	   integer.

	   See "Centralized management of resources" for additional details.

       "OS2::Serve_Messages(force)"
	   Fake on-demand retrieval of outstanding PM messages.  If "force" is
	   false, will not dispatch messages if a real message loop is known
	   to be present.  Returns number of messages retrieved.

	   Dies with "QUITing..." if WM_QUIT message is obtained.

       "OS2::Process_Messages(force [, cnt])"
	   Retrieval of PM messages until window creation/destruction.	If
	   "force" is false, will not dispatch messages if a real message loop
	   is known to be present.

	   Returns change in number of windows.  If "cnt" is given, it is
	   incremented by the number of messages retrieved.

	   Dies with "QUITing..." if WM_QUIT message is obtained.

       "OS2::_control87(new,mask)"
	   the same as _control87(3) of EMX.  Takes integers as arguments,
	   returns the previous coprocessor control word as an integer.  Only
	   bits in "new" which are present in "mask" are changed in the con
	   trol word.

       OS2::get_control87()
	   gets the coprocessor control word as an integer.

       "OS2::set_control87_em(new=MCW_EM,mask=MCW_EM)"
	   The variant of OS2::_control87() with default values good for han
	   dling exception mask: if no "mask", uses exception mask part of
	   "new" only.	If no "new", disables all the floating point excep
	   tions.

	   See "Misfeatures" for details.

       "OS2::DLLname([how [, \&xsub]])"
	   Gives the information about the Perl DLL or the DLL containing the
	   C function bound to by &xsub.  The meaning of "how" is: default
	   (2): full name; 0: handle; 1: module name.

       (Note that some of these may be moved to different libraries - eventu
       ally).

       Prebuilt variables:


       $OS2::emx_rev
	   numeric value is the same as _emx_rev of EMX, a string value the
	   same as _emx_vprt (similar to "0.9c").

       $OS2::emx_env
	   same as _emx_env of EMX, a number similar to 0x8001.

       $OS2::os_ver
	   a number "OS_MAJOR + 0.001 * OS_MINOR".

       $OS2::is_aout
	   true if the Perl library was compiled in AOUT format.

       $OS2::can_fork
	   true if the current executable is an AOUT EMX executable, so Perl
	   can fork.  Do not use this, use the portable check for $Con
	   fig::Config{dfork}.

       $OS2::nsyserror
	   This variable (default is 1) controls whether to enforce the con
	   tents of $^E to start with "SYS0003"-like id.  If set to 0, then
	   the string value of $^E is what is available from the OS/2 message
	   file.  (Some messages in this file have an "SYS0003"-like id
	   prepended, some not.)

       Misfeatures


	  Since flock(3) is present in EMX, but is not functional, it is emu
	   lated by perl.  To disable the emulations, set environment variable
	   "USE_PERL_FLOCK=0".

	  Here is the list of things which may be "broken" on EMX (from EMX
	   docs):

	      The functions recvmsg(3), sendmsg(3), and socketpair(3) are not
	       implemented.

	      sock_init(3) is not required and not implemented.

	      flock(3) is not yet implemented (dummy function).  (Perl has a
	       workaround.)

	      kill(3):	Special treatment of PID=0, PID=1 and PID=-1 is not
	       implemented.

	      waitpid(3):

		     WUNTRACED
			     Not implemented.
		     waitpid() is not implemented for negative values of PID.

	   Note that "kill -9" does not work with the current version of EMX.

	  See "Text-mode filehandles".

	  Unix-domain sockets on OS/2 live in a pseudo-file-system "/sock
	   ets/...".  To avoid a failure to create a socket with a name of a
	   different form, "/socket/" is prepended to the socket name (unless
	   it starts with this already).

	   This may lead to problems later in case the socket is accessed via
	   the "usual" file-system calls using the "initial" name.

	  Apparently, IBM used a compiler (for some period of time around
	   95?) which changes FP mask right and left.  This is not that bad
	   for IBMs programs, but the same compiler was used for DLLs which
	   are used with general-purpose applications.	When these DLLs are
	   used, the state of floating-point flags in the application is not
	   predictable.

	   What is much worse, some DLLs change the floating point flags when
	   in _DLLInitTerm() (e.g., TCP32IP).  This means that even if you do
	   not call any function in the DLL, just the act of loading this DLL
	   will reset your flags.  What is worse, the same compiler was used
	   to compile some HOOK DLLs.  Given that HOOK dlls are executed in
	   the context of all the applications in the system, this means a
	   complete unpredictablity of floating point flags on systems using
	   such HOOK DLLs.  E.g., GAMESRVR.DLL of DIVE origin changes the
	   floating point flags on each write to the TTY of a VIO (windowed
	   text-mode) applications.

	   Some other (not completely debugged) situations when FP flags
	   change include some video drivers (?), and some operations related
	   to creation of the windows.	People who code OpenGL may have more
	   experience on this.

	   Perl is generally used in the situation when all the floating-point
	   exceptions are ignored, as is the default under EMX.  If they are
	   not ignored, some benign Perl programs would get a "SIGFPE" and
	   would die a horrible death.

	   To circumvent this, Perl uses two hacks.  They help against one
	   type of damage only: FP flags changed when loading a DLL.

	   One of the hacks is to disable floating point exceptions on Perl
	   startup (as is the default with EMX).  This helps only with com
	   pile-time-linked DLLs changing the flags before main() had a chance
	   to be called.

	   The other hack is to restore FP flags after a call to dlopen().
	   This helps against similar damage done by DLLs _DLLInitTerm() at
	   runtime.  Currently no way to switch these hacks off is provided.

       Modifications

       Perl modifies some standard C library calls in the following ways:

       "popen"	"my_popen" uses sh.exe if shell is required, cf.
		"PERL_SH_DIR".

       "tmpnam" is created using "TMP" or "TEMP" environment variable, via
		"tempnam".

       "tmpfile"
		If the current directory is not writable, file is created
		using modified "tmpnam", so there may be a race condition.

       "ctermid"
		a dummy implementation.

       "stat"	"os2_stat" special-cases /dev/tty and /dev/con.

       "mkdir", "rmdir"
		these EMX functions do not work if the path contains a trail
		ing "/".  Perl contains a workaround for this.

       "flock"	Since flock(3) is present in EMX, but is not functional, it is
		emulated by perl.  To disable the emulations, set environment
		variable "USE_PERL_FLOCK=0".

       Identifying DLLs

       All the DLLs built with the current versions of Perl have ID strings
       identifying the name of the extension, its version, and the version of
       Perl required for this DLL.  Run "bldlevel DLL-name" to find this info.

       Centralized management of resources

       Since to call certain OS/2 API one needs to have a correctly initial
       ized "Win" subsystem, OS/2-specific extensions may require getting
       "HAB"s and "HMQ"s.  If an extension would do it on its own, another
       extension could fail to initialize.

       Perl provides a centralized management of these resources:

       "HAB"
	   To get the HAB, the extension should call "hab = perl_hab_GET()" in
	   C.  After this call is performed, "hab" may be accessed as
	   "Perl_hab".	There is no need to release the HAB after it is used.

	   If by some reasons perl.h cannot be included, use

	     extern int Perl_hab_GET(void);

	   instead.

       "HMQ"
	   There are two cases:

	   *   the extension needs an "HMQ" only because some API will not
	       work otherwise.	Use "serve = 0" below.

	   *   the extension needs an "HMQ" since it wants to engage in a PM
	       event loop.  Use "serve = 1" below.

	   To get an "HMQ", the extension should call "hmq =
	   perl_hmq_GET(serve)" in C.  After this call is performed, "hmq" may
	   be accessed as "Perl_hmq".

	   To signal to Perl that HMQ is not needed any more, call
	   "perl_hmq_UNSET(serve)".  Perl process will automatically
	   morph/unmorph itself into/from a PM process if HMQ is
	   needed/not-needed.  Perl will automatically enable/disable
	   "WM_QUIT" message during shutdown if the message queue is
	   served/not-served.

	   NOTE.  If during a shutdown there is a message queue which did not
	   disable WM_QUIT, and which did not process the received WM_QUIT
	   message, the shutdown will be automatically cancelled.  Do not call
	   perl_hmq_GET(1) unless you are going to process messages on an
	   orderly basis.

       * Treating errors reported by OS/2 API
	   There are two principal conventions (it is useful to call them
	   "Dos*" and "Win*" - though this part of the function signature is
	   not always determined by the name of the API) of reporting the
	   error conditions of OS/2 API.  Most of "Dos*" APIs report the error
	   code as the result of the call (so 0 means success, and there are
	   many types of errors).  Most of "Win*" API report success/fail via
	   the result being "TRUE"/"FALSE"; to find the reason for the failure
	   one should call WinGetLastError() API.

	   Some "Win*" entry points also overload a "meaningful" return value
	   with the error indicator; having a 0 return value indicates an
	   error.  Yet some other "Win*" entry points overload things even
	   more, and 0 return value may mean a successful call returning a
	   valid value 0, as well as an error condition; in the case of a 0
	   return value one should call WinGetLastError() API to distinguish a
	   successful call from a failing one.

	   By convention, all the calls to OS/2 API should indicate their
	   failures by resetting $^E.  All the Perl-accessible functions which
	   call OS/2 API may be broken into two classes: some die()s when an
	   API error is encountered, the other report the error via a false
	   return value (of course, this does not concern Perl-accessible
	   functions which expect a failure of the OS/2 API call, having some
	   workarounds coded).

	   Obviously, in the situation of the last type of the signature of an
	   OS/2 API, it is must more convenient for the users if the failure
	   is indicated by die()ing: one does not need to check $^E to know
	   that something went wrong.  If, however, this solution is not
	   desirable by some reason, the code in question should reset $^E to
	   0 before making this OS/2 API call, so that the caller of this
	   Perl-accessible function has a chance to distinguish a suc
	   cess-but-0-return value from a failure.  (One may return undef as
	   an alternative way of reporting an error.)

	   The macros to simplify this type of error propagation are

	   "CheckOSError(expr)"
	       Returns true on error, sets $^E.  Expects expr() be a call of
	       "Dos*"-style API.

	   "CheckWinError(expr)"
	       Returns true on error, sets $^E.  Expects expr() be a call of
	       "Win*"-style API.

	   "SaveWinError(expr)"
	       Returns "expr", sets $^E from WinGetLastError() if "expr" is
	       false.

	   "SaveCroakWinError(expr,die,name1,name2)"
	       Returns "expr", sets $^E from WinGetLastError() if "expr" is
	       false, and die()s if "die" and $^E are true.  The message to
	       die is the concatenated strings "name1" and "name2", separated
	       by ": " from the contents of $^E.

	   "WinError_2_Perl_rc"
	       Sets "Perl_rc" to the return value of WinGetLastError().

	   "FillWinError"
	       Sets "Perl_rc" to the return value of WinGetLastError(), and
	       sets $^E to the corresponding value.

	   "FillOSError(rc)"
	       Sets "Perl_rc" to "rc", and sets $^E to the corresponding
	       value.

       * Loading DLLs and ordinals in DLLs
	   Some DLLs are only present in some versions of OS/2, or in some
	   configurations of OS/2.  Some exported entry points are present
	   only in DLLs shipped with some versions of OS/2.  If these DLLs and
	   entry points were linked directly for a Perl executable/DLL or from
	   a Perl extensions, this binary would work only with the specified
	   versions/setups.  Even if these entry points were not needed, the
	   load of the executable (or DLL) would fail.

	   For example, many newer useful APIs are not present in OS/2 v2;
	   many PM-related APIs require DLLs not available on floppy-boot
	   setup.

	   To make these calls fail only when the calls are executed, one
	   should call these API via a dynamic linking API.  There is a sub
	   system in Perl to simplify such type of calls.  A large number of
	   entry points available for such linking is provided (see
	   "entries_ordinals" - and also "PMWIN_entries" - in os2ish.h).
	   These ordinals can be accessed via the APIs:

	     CallORD(), DeclFuncByORD(), DeclVoidFuncByORD(),
	     DeclOSFuncByORD(), DeclWinFuncByORD(), AssignFuncPByORD(),
	     DeclWinFuncByORD_CACHE(), DeclWinFuncByORD_CACHE_survive(),
	     DeclWinFuncByORD_CACHE_resetError_survive(),
	     DeclWinFunc_CACHE(), DeclWinFunc_CACHE_resetError(),
	     DeclWinFunc_CACHE_survive(), DeclWinFunc_CACHE_resetError_survive()

	   See the header files and the C code in the supplied OS/2-related
	   modules for the details on usage of these functions.

	   Some of these functions also combine dynaloading semantic with the
	   error-propagation semantic discussed above.

Perl flavors
       Because of idiosyncrasies of OS/2 one cannot have all the eggs in the
       same basket (though EMX environment tries hard to overcome this limita
       tions, so the situation may somehow improve). There are 4 executables
       for Perl provided by the distribution:

       perl.exe

       The main workhorse. This is a chimera executable: it is compiled as an
       "a.out"-style executable, but is linked with "omf"-style dynamic
       library perl.dll, and with dynamic CRT DLL. This executable is a VIO
       application.

       It can load perl dynamic extensions, and it can fork().

       Note. Keep in mind that fork() is needed to open a pipe to yourself.

       perl_.exe

       This is a statically linked "a.out"-style executable. It cannot load
       dynamic Perl extensions. The executable supplied in binary distribu
       tions has a lot of extensions prebuilt, thus the above restriction is
       important only if you use custom-built extensions. This executable is a
       VIO application.

       This is the only executable with does not require OS/2. The friends
       locked into "M$" world would appreciate the fact that this executable
       runs under DOS, Win0.3*, Win0.95 and WinNT with an appropriate exten
       der. See "Other OSes".

       perl__.exe

       This is the same executable as perl___.exe, but it is a PM application.

       Note. Usually (unless explicitly redirected during the startup) STDIN,
       STDERR, and STDOUT of a PM application are redirected to nul. However,
       it is possible to see them if you start "perl__.exe" from a PM program
       which emulates a console window, like Shell mode of Emacs or EPM. Thus
       it is possible to use Perl debugger (see perldebug) to debug your PM
       application (but beware of the message loop lockups - this will not
       work if you have a message queue to serve, unless you hook the serving
       into the getc() function of the debugger).

       Another way to see the output of a PM program is to run it as

	 pm_prog args 2>&1 | cat -

       with a shell different from cmd.exe, so that it does not create a link
       between a VIO session and the session of "pm_porg".  (Such a link
       closes the VIO window.)	E.g., this works with sh.exe - or with Perl!

	 open P, pm_prog args 2>&1 | or die;
	 print while 

; The flavor perl__.exe is required if you want to start your program without a VIO window present, but not "detach"ed (run "help detach" for more info). Very useful for extensions which use PM, like "Perl/Tk" or "OpenGL". Note also that the differences between PM and VIO executables are only in the default behaviour. One can start any executable in any kind of session by using the arguments "/fs", "/pm" or "/win" switches of the command "start" (of CMD.EXE or a similar shell). Alternatively, one can use the numeric first argument of the "system" Perl function (see OS2::Process). perl___.exe This is an "omf"-style executable which is dynamically linked to perl.dll and CRT DLL. I know no advantages of this executable over "perl.exe", but it cannot fork() at all. Well, one advantage is that the build process is not so convoluted as with "perl.exe". It is a VIO application. Why strange names? Since Perl processes the "#!"-line (cf. "DESCRIPTION" in perlrun, "Switches" in perlrun, "Not a perl script" in perldiag, "No Perl script found in input" in perldiag), it should know when a program is a Perl. There is some naming convention which allows Perl to distinguish cor rect lines from wrong ones. The above names are almost the only names allowed by this convention which do not contain digits (which have absolutely different semantics). Why dynamic linking? Well, having several executables dynamically linked to the same huge library has its advantages, but this would not substantiate the addi tional work to make it compile. The reason is the complicated-to-devel opers but very quick and convenient-to-users "hard" dynamic linking used by OS/2. There are two distinctive features of the dyna-linking model of OS/2: first, all the references to external functions are resolved at the compile time; second, there is no runtime fixup of the DLLs after they are loaded into memory. The first feature is an enormous advantage over other models: it avoids conflicts when several DLLs used by an application export entries with the same name. In such cases "other" models of dyna-linking just choose between these two entry points using some random criterion - with predictable disasters as results. But it is the second feature which requires the build of perl.dll. The address tables of DLLs are patched only once, when they are loaded. The addresses of the entry points into DLLs are guaranteed to be the same for all the programs which use the same DLL. This removes the runtime fixup - once DLL is loaded, its code is read-only. While this allows some (significant?) performance advantages, this makes life much harder for developers, since the above scheme makes it impossible for a DLL to be "linked" to a symbol in the .EXE file. Indeed, this would need a DLL to have different relocations tables for the (different) executables which use this DLL. However, a dynamically loaded Perl extension is forced to use some sym bols from the perl executable, e.g., to know how to find the arguments to the functions: the arguments live on the perl internal evaluation stack. The solution is to put the main code of the interpreter into a DLL, and make the .EXE file which just loads this DLL into memory and supplies command-arguments. The extension DLL cannot link to symbols in .EXE, but it has no problem linking to symbols in the .DLL. This greatly increases the load time for the application (as well as complexity of the compilation). Since interpreter is in a DLL, the C RTL is basically forced to reside in a DLL as well (otherwise exten sions would not be able to use CRT). There are some advantages if you use different flavors of perl, such as running perl.exe and perl__.exe simultaneously: they share the memory of perl.dll. NOTE. There is one additional effect which makes DLLs more wasteful: DLLs are loaded in the shared memory region, which is a scarse resource given the 512M barrier of the "standard" OS/2 virtual memory. The code of .EXE files is also shared by all the processes which use the partic ular .EXE, but they are "shared in the private address space of the process"; this is possible because the address at which different sections of the .EXE file are loaded is decided at compile-time, thus all the processes have these sections loaded at same addresses, and no fixup of internal links inside the .EXE is needed. Since DLLs may be loaded at run time, to have the same mechanism for DLLs one needs to have the address range of any of the loaded DLLs in the system to be available in all the processes which did not load a particular DLL yet. This is why the DLLs are mapped to the shared mem ory region. Why chimera build? Current EMX environment does not allow DLLs compiled using Unixish "a.out" format to export symbols for data (or at least some types of data). This forces "omf"-style compile of perl.dll. Current EMX environment does not allow .EXE files compiled in "omf" format to fork(). fork() is needed for exactly three Perl operations: explicit fork() in the script, "open FH, "|-"" "open FH, "-|"", in other words, opening pipes to itself. While these operations are not questions of life and death, they are needed for a lot of useful scripts. This forces "a.out"-style compile of perl.exe. ENVIRONMENT Here we list environment variables with are either OS/2- and DOS- and Win*-specific, or are more important under OS/2 than under other OSes. "PERLLIB_PREFIX" Specific for EMX port. Should have the form path1;path2 or path1 path2 If the beginning of some prebuilt path matches path1, it is substituted with path2. Should be used if the perl library is moved from the default location in preference to "PERL(5)LIB", since this would not leave wrong entries in @INC. For example, if the compiled version of perl looks for @INC in f:/perllib/lib, and you want to install the library in h:/opt/gnu, do set PERLLIB_PREFIX=f:/perllib/lib;h:/opt/gnu This will cause Perl with the prebuilt @INC of f:/perllib/lib/5.00553/os2 f:/perllib/lib/5.00553 f:/perllib/lib/site_perl/5.00553/os2 f:/perllib/lib/site_perl/5.00553 . to use the following @INC: h:/opt/gnu/5.00553/os2 h:/opt/gnu/5.00553 h:/opt/gnu/site_perl/5.00553/os2 h:/opt/gnu/site_perl/5.00553 . "PERL_BADLANG" If 0, perl ignores setlocale() failing. May be useful with some strange locales. "PERL_BADFREE" If 0, perl would not warn of in case of unwarranted free(). With older perls this might be useful in conjunction with the module DB_File, which was buggy when dynamically linked and OMF-built. Should not be set with newer Perls, since this may hide some real prob lems. "PERL_SH_DIR" Specific for EMX port. Gives the directory part of the location for sh.exe. "USE_PERL_FLOCK" Specific for EMX port. Since flock(3) is present in EMX, but is not functional, it is emulated by perl. To disable the emulations, set environment variable "USE_PERL_FLOCK=0". "TMP" or "TEMP" Specific for EMX port. Used as storage place for temporary files. Evolution Here we list major changes which could make you by surprise. Text-mode filehandles Starting from version 5.8, Perl uses a builtin translation layer for text-mode files. This replaces the efficient well-tested EMX layer by some code which should be best characterized as a "quick hack". In addition to possible bugs and an inability to follow changes to the translation policy with off/on switches of TERMIO translation, this introduces a serious incompatible change: before sysread() on text-mode filehandles would go through the translation layer, now it would not. Priorities "setpriority" and "getpriority" are not compatible with earlier ports by Andreas Kaiser. See "setpriority, getpriority". DLL name mangling: pre 5.6.2 With the release 5.003_01 the dynamically loadable libraries should be rebuilt when a different version of Perl is compiled. In particular, DLLs (including perl.dll) are now created with the names which contain a checksum, thus allowing workaround for OS/2 scheme of caching DLLs. It may be possible to code a simple workaround which would find the old DLLs looking through the old @INC; mangle the names according to the scheme of new perl and copy the DLLs to these names; edit the internal "LX" tables of DLL to reflect the change of the name (probably not needed for Perl extension DLLs, since the inter nally coded names are not used for "specific" DLLs, they used only for "global" DLLs). edit the internal "IMPORT" tables and change the name of the "old" perl????.dll to the "new" perl????.dll. DLL name mangling: 5.6.2 and beyond In fact mangling of extension DLLs was done due to misunderstanding of the OS/2 dynaloading model. OS/2 (effectively) maintains two different tables of loaded DLL: Global DLLs those loaded by the base name from "LIBPATH"; including those asso ciated at link time; specific DLLs loaded by the full name. When resolving a request for a global DLL, the table of already-loaded specific DLLs is (effectively) ignored; moreover, specific DLLs are always loaded from the prescribed path. There is/was a minor twist which makes this scheme fragile: what to do with DLLs loaded from "BEGINLIBPATH" and "ENDLIBPATH" (which depend on the process) . from "LIBPATH" which effectively depends on the process (although "LIBPATH" is the same for all the processes). Unless "LIBPATHSTRICT" is set to "T" (and the kernel is after 2000/09/01), such DLLs are considered to be global. When loading a global DLL it is first looked in the table of already-loaded global DLLs. Because of this the fact that one executable loaded a DLL from "BEGINLIBPATH" and "ENDLIBPATH", or . from "LIBPATH" may affect which DLL is loaded when another executable requests a DLL with the same name. This is the reason for version-specific mangling of the DLL name for perl DLL. Since the Perl extension DLLs are always loaded with the full path, there is no need to mangle their names in a version-specific ways: their directory already reflects the corresponding version of perl, and @INC takes into account binary compatibility with older version. Starting from 5.6.2 the name mangling scheme is fixed to be the same as for Perl 5.005_53 (same as in a popular binary release). Thus new Perls will be able to resolve the names of old extension DLLs if @INC allows finding their directories. However, this still does not guarantee that these DLL may be loaded. The reason is the mangling of the name of the Perl DLL. And since the extension DLLs link with the Perl DLL, extension DLLs for older ver sions would load an older Perl DLL, and would most probably segfault (since the data in this DLL is not properly initialized). There is a partial workaround (which can be made complete with newer OS/2 kernels): create a forwarder DLL with the same name as the DLL of the older version of Perl, which forwards the entry points to the newer Perls DLL. Make this DLL accessible on (say) the "BEGINLIBPATH" of the new Perl executable. When the new executable accesses old Perls extension DLLs, they would request the old Perls DLL by name, get the forwarder instead, so effectively will link with the currently running (new) Perl DLL. This may break in two ways: Old perl executable is started when a new executable is running has loaded an extension compiled for the old executable (ouph!). In this case the old executable will get a forwarder DLL instead of the old perl DLL, so would link with the new perl DLL. While not directly fatal, it will behave the same as new executable. This beats the whole purpose of explicitly starting an old executable. A new executable loads an extension compiled for the old executable when an old perl executable is running. In this case the extension will not pick up the forwarder - with fatal results. With support for "LIBPATHSTRICT" this may be circumvented - unless one of DLLs is started from . from "LIBPATH" (I do not know whether "LIB PATHSTRICT" affects this case). REMARK. Unless newer kernels allow . in "BEGINLIBPATH" (older do not), this mess cannot be completely cleaned. (It turns out that as of the beginning of 2002, . is not allowed, but .\. is - and it has the same effect.) REMARK. "LIBPATHSTRICT", "BEGINLIBPATH" and "ENDLIBPATH" are not envi ronment variables, although cmd.exe emulates them on "SET ..." lines. From Perl they may be accessed by Cwd::extLibpath and Cwd::extLib path_set. DLL forwarder generation Assume that the old DLL is named perlE0AC.dll (as is one for 5.005_53), and the new version is 5.6.1. Create a file perl5shim.def-leader with LIBRARY perlE0AC INITINSTANCE TERMINSTANCE DESCRIPTION @#perl5-porters@perl.org:5.006001#@ Perl module for 5.00553 -> Perl 5.6.1 forwarder CODE LOADONCALL DATA LOADONCALL NONSHARED MULTIPLE EXPORTS modifying the versions/names as needed. Run perl -wnle "next if 0../EXPORTS/; print qq( \"$1\") if /\"(\w+)\"/" perl5.def >lst in the Perl build directory (to make the DLL smaller replace perl5.def with the definition file for the older version of Perl if present). cat perl5shim.def-leader lst >perl5shim.def gcc -Zomf -Zdll -o perlE0AC.dll perl5shim.def -s -llibperl (ignore multiple "warning L4085"). Threading As of release 5.003_01 perl is linked to multithreaded C RTL DLL. If perl itself is not compiled multithread-enabled, so will not be perls malloc(). However, extensions may use multiple thread on their own risk. This was needed to compile "Perl/Tk" for XFree86-OS/2 out-of-the-box, and link with DLLs for other useful libraries, which typically are com piled with "-Zmt -Zcrtdll". Calls to external programs Due to a popular demand the perl external program calling has been changed wrt Andreas Kaisers port. If perl needs to call an external program via shell, the f:/bin/sh.exe will be called, or whatever is the override, see "PERL_SH_DIR". Thus means that you need to get some copy of a sh.exe as well (I use one from pdksh). The path F:/bin above is set up automatically during the build to a correct value on the builder machine, but is overridable at runtime, Reasons: a consensus on "perl5-porters" was that perl should use one non-overridable shell per platform. The obvious choices for OS/2 are cmd.exe and sh.exe. Having perl build itself would be impossible with cmd.exe as a shell, thus I picked up "sh.exe". This assures almost 100% compatibility with the scripts coming from *nix. As an added benefit this works as well under DOS if you use DOS-enabled port of pdksh (see "Prerequisites"). Disadvantages: currently sh.exe of pdksh calls external programs via fork()/exec(), and there is no functioning exec() on OS/2. exec() is emulated by EMX by an asynchronous call while the caller waits for child completion (to pretend that the "pid" did not change). This means that 1 extra copy of sh.exe is made active via fork()/exec(), which may lead to some resources taken from the system (even if we do not count extra work needed for fork()ing). Note that this a lesser issue now when we do not spawn sh.exe unless needed (metachars found). One can always start cmd.exe explicitly via system cmd, /c, mycmd, arg1, arg2, ... If you need to use cmd.exe, and do not want to hand-edit thousands of your scripts, the long-term solution proposed on p5-p is to have a directive use OS2::Cmd; which will override system(), exec(), , and "open(,...|)". With current perl you may override only system(), readpipe() - the explicit version of , and maybe exec(). The code will substitute the one-argu ment call to system() by "CORE::system(cmd.exe, /c, shift)". If you have some working code for "OS2::Cmd", please send it to me, I will include it into distribution. I have no need for such a module, so cannot test it. For the details of the current situation with calling external pro grams, see "2 (and DOS) programs under Perl" in Starting OS. Set us mention a couple of features: External scripts may be called by their basename. Perl will try the same extensions as when processing -S command-line switch. External scripts starting with "#!" or "extproc " will be executed directly, without calling the shell, by calling the program speci fied on the rest of the first line. Memory allocation Perl uses its own malloc() under OS/2 - interpreters are usually mal loc-bound for speed, but perl is not, since its malloc is light ning-fast. Perl-memory-usage-tuned benchmarks show that Perls malloc is 5 times quicker than EMX one. I do not have convincing data about memory footprint, but a (pretty random) benchmark showed that Perls one is 5% better. Combination of perls malloc() and rigid DLL name resolution creates a special problem with library functions which expect their return value to be free()d by systems free(). To facilitate extensions which need to call such functions, system memory-allocation functions are still available with the prefix "emx_" added. (Currently only DLL perl has this, it should propagate to perl_.exe shortly.) Threads One can build perl with thread support enabled by providing "-D usethreads" option to Configure. Currently OS/2 support of threads is very preliminary. Most notable problems: "COND_WAIT" may have a race condition (but probably does not due to edge-trig gered nature of OS/2 Event semaphores). (Needs a reimplementation (in terms of chaining waiting threads, with the linked list stored in per-thread structure?)?) os2.c has a couple of static variables used in OS/2-specific functions. (Need to be moved to per-thread structure, or serialized?) Note that these problems should not discourage experimenting, since they have a low probability of affecting small programs. BUGS This description is not updated often (since 5.6.1?), see ./os2/Changes (perlos2delta) for more info. AUTHOR Ilya Zakharevich, cpan@ilyaz.org SEE ALSO perl(1). perl v5.8.8 2008-04-25 PERLOS2(1)





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